Sifting for clues to cake recipe

Wouldn't that make a great cake? One reader wants to surprise her husband with a chocolate-orange cake like the one Grandma used to make. The Daley Question is on the case.

Wouldn't that make a great cake? One reader wants to surprise her husband with a chocolate-orange cake like the one Grandma used to make. The Daley Question is on the case. (KRT, Tribune file photos/Tribune illustration)

Bill Daley, Tribune Newspapers

Q: My husband's 50th birthday is coming quickly and I'd love to make the cake that he raves about that his grandmother made (and never left a recipe for, of course, since she didn't use one!). She lived from 1900-1990 and it was a chocolate cake with mild orange flavoring and white "harder frosting" (I'm guessing icing?).

Ingredients that he wrote down that she gave him from memory after she had stopped baking include: eggs (separated), bittersweet chocolate, sugar, butter, water, vanilla extract, sour cream, baking powder, and cake flour. The frosting had powdered sugar, butter, half and half and possibly grated orange peel. Any ideas of a similar recipe would be much appreciated since I want to surprise him with it.

—Devida Braverman, Vernon Hills

A: What a nice wife you are to try and search out this recipe. Even in today's Google-ed world, finding a recipe can be daunting because there are so many choices out there. How do you find THE recipe among thousands?

The first thing to do is narrow the search before you go online. Check with family: Does anyone else remember this cake and its ingredients? Did anyone write it down when Grandma was talking about it? Does anyone remember what the grandmother's favorite cookbook was? She might not have left a recipe because she relied on the book, or more likely, made the recipe so many times she memorized it. Snoop around.

After that, hit the Internet. I found a number of recipes online that fit your very general description but have no idea which, if any, is the right one. I'm afraid you are going to have to cross your fingers and make one. I suspect your husband will be so touched, he'll like whatever you bake even better than his grandmother's recipe.

I started my search by looking up the cake ingredients using Google. The results I got were too general— there were too many wrong choices. I then typed "chocolate cake made with sour cream." Better; at least 10 recipes to start off with. Then I remembered you noting the cake had an orange flavoring so I added "orange" to the search terms. This didn't quite work; the search results started veering more toward an orange cake. So I fiddled with the wording again, going for "orange chocolate cake sour cream."

Yummly.com, a website that bills itself as containing "every recipe in the world," had 34 recipes that popped up under this heading. "Dark Chocolate Orange Cake" struck me as similar to what you were looking for, except for the use whole eggs and unsweetened cocoa powder in lieu of separated eggs and bittersweet chocolate. Oh, and the addition of chopped almonds at the end (you can always omit). The recipe is also baked in a tube pan, which may or may not have been used by your husband's grandmother.

Here's that recipe from Yummly.com, credited to Allrecipes.com and a cook known only as "Carol":